BIG Update: PZ Myers of Pharyngula is going on strike until SEED makes changes both in its communication policies and improves its technical support! (Greg Laden joins the strike.)

Update: Food Frontiers is officially off of Scienceblogs. It remains to be seen how this will affect the bloggers’ decision to stay or go — some have already stated that they won’t be coming back.

If you haven’t heard, the Scienceblogs community has gone through a tremendous upheaval over a short span of 24 hours, with a number of their best science writers basically resigning from the community in protest. The spark that ignited the powderkeg was the introduction of a corporate paid for and sponsored blog to the science blogging mix, Food Frontiers: a blog by PepsiCo on nutrition, of all things! This has been seen by many, if not most, of the bloggers as corporate propaganda masquerading as legitimate science, which hurts the reputation of said bloggers and corrupts the integrity of the system.

I don’t have enough of an understanding of the details to make a strong statement about the controversy here (at the very least, the whole thing seems like a very big PR clusterf#$k on the part of SEED). Right now I can understand the arguments of both those who have chosen to stay at SBs and those who have chosen to move on to, or rather back to, independent blogging. I did want to say that I support all of the Sciencebloggers and feel your pain right now (hell, the whole thing has made me anxious, and I have no association with SBs!).

I also wanted to help out those who have departed by throwing a few links towards their new/old homes!

41 Responses to The sciencebloggosphere is a changing! (updated)

Thanks for sending a link my way; I’m not sure when I’ll be using my WordPress site to any serious extent (or if I’ll set up a new one, etc.), but it’s appreciated.

It’s possible that the SEED management will get this whole thing sorted out, to the satisfaction of those who haven’t yet made up their minds. (I’ve already seen some changes on the labelling of the blog-shaped advertisement.) The whole thing was managed so incompetently, though, that what might’ve been a necessary evil turned into a serious cluster#%$#!! all around. Any style of management which can lead to that once can lead to it again . . . and I have no interest in going through an acrimonious mess like this, six months or a year from now.

So, good luck to the people staying — and to the folks who’re leaving, let’s do lunch sometime! (-:

Whine, whine, cry, cry. These bloggers were accepting payments for their writings from SEED, no? Payments came from sponsored advertising, no? Click advertising is a known to be a non-sustainable business model (Who clicks on these things anyhow? Most of us don’t even see them thanks to adblockers.). So these bloggers were supported by corporations up until yesterday. Now they want to play self-righteous over the addition of a new blog that doesn’t even have any content to judge yet and whose authorship is completely transparent. Cry me a river.

Another_Scientist – “Whine, whine, cry, cry” . Really? This is your most sophisticated retort? Even if you have a valid point in your post, I am totally disregarding it. Why not stick your tongue out too while you are at it.

That’s the impression I’ve gotten, though I haven’t had a chance to look at it in detail. People who think that this is simply a bunch of anti-corporatist idealists complaining too much should take a look at Martin’s analysis here.

“Moving on now” does not mean pretending it didn’t happen, or going forward on the same old course. There are real structural problems in how Seed is managing the blogs, and they’re going to have to take steps to fix them, or we’ll just get another debacle, and another, and another, and then we’re all done.

I wouldn’t question anyone who left. There were some discussions going on behind the scenes between me and some third parties that had me thinking, too…and there was maybe a 50/50 chance that I’d have been out the door, and it’s only that they finally ended up doing the right thing that tipped me away from the exit.

Another such incident, though, or a continuation of the neglect we’ve been struggling under, and alternatives would look much, much more attractive.

I strongly encourage everyone to support these writers. They are fantastic, but not being in a larger network drops their readership significantly as folks tend not to hunt around. I like to use feed readers like Viigo for my blackberry, and google reader.

On a personal note, I haven’t made a decision yet as to where or if I’ll go, but for now I’m continuing to write.

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The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas.